Andy Worthington at a previous radio appearance, discussing Guantánamo in Northampton, Massachusetts in January 2015.

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On Saturday, I was delighted to be visited by Andy Bungay, from Wandsworth’s Riverside Radio, for an interview broadcast on Andy’s evening show on Sunday, in which we discussed Guantánamo, which I’ve been covering for the last 13 years, and campaigning for its closure, and the housing crisis in London, which I’ve also been involved in challenging for the last few years. I was on Andy’s show back in September, and it was great to have the opportunity to talk again.

Our interview starts about 1 hours and five minutes into the show, with a discussion of Guantánamo, and, in part, the case of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, whose release in October 2015 I campaigned to secure, initially working with the Save Shaker Aamer campaign, and, over the last year of Shaker’s imprisonment, via We Stand With Shaker, a campaign I set up with fellow activist Joanne MacInnes. This involved creating a giant inflatable figure of Shaker, a PR stunt that might have been widely ignored, but that, instead, led to a hundred celebrities and MPs being willing to have their photos taken with the figure, and to call for his release.

At 1:22, Andy played ’Song for Shaker Aamer’, a solo version of The Four Fathers’ song, used as the campaign song for We Stand With Shaker, which was recorded live in Washington, D.C. in January 2016, where I played it at an event calling for Guantánamo’s closure on the evening before the 14th anniversary of its opening, with lyrics amended to reflect Shaker’s release. The part about Shaker being “back in London” got a big cheer from the crowd!

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.

Today the grotesque and unforgivable prison at Guantánamo Bay, on the grounds of the US’s military base in Cuba, has been open for 6,118 days — 6,118 days of denying foreign-born Muslim prisoners due process rights (the right to be charged with a crime, and put on trial), or the protections of the Geneva Conventions, in a place set up to be beyond the reach of the rule of US law, where men could be — and were — tortured and subjected to human experimentation; where nine men have died, and where there is still no end in sight for this legal, moral and ethical abomination.

Today I’m publicising the links to the first three parts of my six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, which I first compiled in 2009, and which I’ve just updated, for the first time since 2016 — Part One (covering prisoners with the Internment Serial Numbers 1-133), Part Two (covering prisoner numbers 134-268) and Part Three (covering prisoner numbers 269-496). The six parts of the prisoner list provide details of all 779 prisoners held by the US military at Guantánamo since the prison opened, with references to where they appear in the 2,230 articles I have written about Guantánamo over the last — nearly — ten and a half years, and where their stories are told in my book The Guantánamo Files.

That book, published eleven years ago, a year and half after I began working as a full-time unpaid freelance researcher and writer on Guantánamo, involved me researching and telling the stories of the men held there, and demonstrating how few of them seem to have had any genuine connection to al-Qaeda or any form of international terrorism, and how they were overwhelmingly either just foot soldiers in an inter-Muslim civil war in Afghanistan that preceded the 9/11 attacks, or, in many cases, civilians caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, cynically picked off by officials or warlords looking to make some money off the US’s commitment to paying bounty payments for any Muslim who could be passed off as a “terror suspect.” Read the rest of this entry »

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.

“Tell Donald Trump: As long as Guantánamo is open, America will never be great again. And as long as America is committing injustice, America will never be great again. And as long as America has military posts all over the world, America will never be great again. And as long as America is supporting and helping dictators all over the world, America will never be great again.”

Today, June 15, 2018, is a depressing milestone in the long history of U.S. detention at Guantánamo Bay. Today the Guantánamo prison, set up after the 9/11 attacks, has been open for 6,000 days.

Most of the men held at Guantánamo over the last 6,000 days (16 years, five months and four days) have been held without charge or trial, in defiance of international laws and treaties governing the treatment of prisoners. There are only two acceptable ways to deprive an individual of their liberty: either as a criminal suspect, to be tried in a federal court; or as a prisoner of war, held unmolested until the end of hostilities. The men at Guantánamo are neither. Instead, after 9/11, the Bush administration conceived of a novel category of prisoner — one without any rights whatsoever — and implemented this at Guantánamo. Read the rest of this entry »

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.

Almost 2,200 of those articles have been about the prison at Guantánamo Bay and the men held there, the main focus of my work as a writer and a campaigner since the spring of 2006, when I began working on the manuscript for my book The Guantánamo Files, which I completed in May 2007, and which was published that September.

If you’ve been with me all that time — as some of you, perhaps, have been — you’ll know that I started publishing articles here after the fourth prisoner at Guantánamo died, a man named Abdul Rahman al-Amri, allegedly by committing suicide. After spending 14 months researching and writing about the prisoners, based on a forensic analysis of the many thousands of pages of information about them that the Pentagon had been obliged to release after they lost a Freedom of Information lawsuit, I think it’s fair to say that I knew more than anyone in the world about the prisoners at that point, but although I pitched a proposal to the Guardian, I was told that they’d pick up on the Associated Press’s wire, and so I published it myself, as I already had a website up and running (technically, a WordPress blog), and hoped people would notice. Read the rest of this entry »

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.

This time of year has always been a significant time for anyone concerned with human rights to reflect on what has or hasn’t been achieved in the last twelve months, and to make plans for the new year.

A crucial, and long established date is December 10, which the United Nations designated as Human Rights Day in 1950, on the second anniversary of the ratification by the UN of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which, in a Facebook post on Human Rights Day, I described as “probably the most wonderful aspirational document in human history, born out of the soul-churning horrors of the Second World War.”

The UN, on its Human Rights Day page, says of the UDHR that it “sets out universal values and a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations. It establishes the equal dignity and worth of every person. Thanks to the Declaration, and States’ commitments to its principles, the dignity of millions has been uplifted and the foundation for a more just world has been laid. While its promise is yet to be fully realized, the very fact that it has stood the test of time is testament to the enduring universality of its perennial values of equality, justice and human dignity.”

Amongst the UDHR’s 30 articles are prohibitions on the use of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and arbitrary arrest, as well as the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial, all of which have long been of great significance to those like myself who have been writing about Guantánamo and working to get the prison closed. Read the rest of this entry »

Chris and I have spoken many times before — generally at this time of the year, to reflect on the situation at Guantánamo around the time of the anniversary of its opening, on January 11. Check out our interviews in January 2014, January 2015 and January 2016.

For this year’s interview, I ran though the dying days of the Obama administration, pointing out how, despite President Obama’s promise, on his second day in office in January 2009, to close the prison, it remained open as he left office primarily because he had persistently failed to prioritize its closure throughout the previous eight years. Read the rest of this entry »

Please support my work! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the first two months of the Trump administration.

On Sunday I got back from my US tour to coincide with the 15th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, which was on January 11, and I’m posting the video below of a powerful event I took part in during my visit — a panel discussion, on “Trump, Torture and Guantánamo” (and Barack Obama’s legacy) at Revolution Books in Harlem.

I was delighted to take part in the event with another speaker I had invited, Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at City University of New York (CUNY), with whom I have appeared at events many times before (see here, for example), and who, back in 2012, provided me exclusively with unclassified notes of meetings with Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, which I published on my website and on the websiteof the Close Guantánamo campaign that I co-founded with the attorney Tom Wilner in January 2012, marking the 10th anniversary of the prison’s opening.

Please support my work! I’m currently in the US to campaign for the closure of Guantánamo on the 15th anniversary of its opening, and trying to raise $1000 (£800) to support my visit.

Regular readers will know that I have had a long involvement in the case of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, who was finally freed in October 2015 after a long campaign to secure his release, which involved MPs, the mainstream British media, and protest groups including We Stand With Shaker, the organization I co-founded in November 2014 with the activist Joanne MacInnes, which used a giant inflatable figure of Shaker to highlight his cause, with some quite spectacular success in the media, and with celebrities and MPs.

Apart from a flurry of activity immediately after his release, Shaker has had little involvement with the media this year, although his words always have resonance, so I was delighted to see, a few days ago, that he had spoken to Al-Jazeera. Read the rest of this entry »

For Christmas, if you want a last-minute present, why not buy some music by my band The Four Fathers? Please also feel free to like us on Facebook, and to follow us on Twitter.

We play politically-charged roots reggae and rock — mostly original songs, and mostly my own compositions —and our first LP ‘Love and War’ was released last year, and is available on CD via Bandcamp (it can be sent anywhere in the world). On our Bandcamp page you can also buy the whole album as a download, or buy individual tracks — and you can also listen to or buy our subsequent EP, ‘Fighting Injustice,’ and our song ‘Close Guantánamo,’ released as an online single, as downloads.

We’re currently working on our second album, which will be released next year, featuring a number of songs that are becoming prominent in our live shows: ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?’ (about how white westerners regard their lives as more important than others), ‘London’ (about gentrification, and how London has changed over the last 30 years), ‘Riot’ (about the need to end inequality), ‘Equal Rights And Justice For All’ (about the importance of habeas corpus) — as well as two songs by guitarist Richard Clare — ‘When He Is Sane’, about mental health, and ‘She’s Back’ (about ‘Pussy Riot’) — and some love songs, ‘Tell Me Baby’ (about love and aging), ‘Dreamers’ (written for a friend’s 50th birthday) and ‘River Run Dry’ (about the end of a relationship, a song I wrote as a young man).

For now, however, feel free to check out our ten most popular songs on Bandcamp and have a listen — or buy them if you’d like, which would, of course, delight us! Read the rest of this entry »

Exactly one year ago, on October 30, 2015, Shaker Aamer, the last British resident held in the US’s disgraceful “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, arrived home in the UK, a free man.

Prior to his release, Shaker had been told that the US no longer wanted to hold him in 2007, under George W. Bush, and was told again under President Obama, in 2009, that he had been approved for release. However, it took an extraordinary effort, by over 100,000 concerned British citizens, by MPs, by the mainstream British media and by campaigners, including myself, for him to finally be released — all because, it seems, an official or officials somewhere within the US administration refused to accept that he had unanimously been approved for release by a stringent US inter-agency review process, and regarded him, implausibly, as someone dangerous.

Today, he sent the following message to everyone who supported him over the long years of his imprisonment without charge or trial:

Dear good, beautiful, just people all over the world,

I just wanted to say thank you and I hope my message gets to you where you are in the best of health and happiness.

I am well by the grace of Allah (God) and I am very happy to let you know that I pray for all of you.

No words will be enough to show my gratitude to you.

Thank you for every morning I wake up out of that horrible place. Thank you for every meal I eat out of that miserable place. Thanks for every breath I take out of that dark place.

I have no doubt you can hear my thoughts, all of you good people out there.

Investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo, co-director, We Stand With Shaker. Also, singer and songwriter (The Four Fathers) and photographer (The State of London). Email Andy Worthington